Month: September 2016

I was a different person a year ago. I was weak and I was broken. People would hurt me and I would say nothing. I would smile through it and I was so numb that I could barely cry. When I am in a conflict with someone, it is so, so easy for me to take the high road. It is easy for me to apologize and say it’s all my fault even if I don’t believe it. I haven’t gotten into a conflict from age 13 to 22. When someone hurts me, I smile, or I say that I know what they are saying is true. If they talk to me like nothing happened, I talk to them like nothing happened, even if I’m very upset about it. Taking the high road is easy for me. If you see me smiling when someone says something rude to me, I am not being strong. I am being weak. However, I understand completely that some people need to fight to not yell, to not make an annoyed face or laugh at the person making an argument against them. To some people, taking the high road is so important to their personal growth. For me, ignoring people, looking at them in a way that shows them I am hurt or angry, is incredibly hard for me. I’ve been having problems lately with trying to be strong and people thinking that the image of strength is one thing. You need to take the high road or you are a pathetic weakling, or you need to fight or you are a pathetic weakling. But it’s not true. It is so easy for some of us to laugh off our pain, and harder for us to show our feelings. For some people, it is easy to show our pain, and harder to take the high road. This goes for so many things. We are all different, and we all have different fears. So showing our strength is as different for everyone as our personalities differ as well. Another example could be a person wanting to feel alive with doing anything that can be considered an adrenaline rush, and then looking at their family and being afraid to lose them if something happens. This strength can be seem as someone who is really afraid of not having this adrenaline rush, so he/she is going to give all of these risks up in order to take away their families anxiety. Then there is the other person who is afraid of taking risks and must take risks to face their fears. Both scenarios are people facing their fears. And both people are strong.

My dreams have saved me. Last year my therapist said I’m young and can do anything. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to be with my dog and be with my eating disorder. Then I got a change of heart, and now I want everything. Mainly I want to make a different in animals lives. With my eating disorder I cannot do that. How can I without energy? So I made another blog. I will still be writing on this one, but I also have another one now called lovinganimalrights.wordpress.com and this is without talk of my eating disorder. My animal blog is strictly my recovery. And since this is strictly my recovery, I will only write in it when I am in recovery. I’m making a promise to myself that if I ever relapse, I will stop writing in that blog. If I ever relapse, I will feel the depth of what it feels like to lose everything due to the eating disorder. I’m done Ed. I’m ready to help save animals. Like I said in my depression post, this is what I’ve wanted since I was a child. Going back to my healthy dreams of my childhood is what cured my depression. Here comes an even happier life!

My insecurity has been helped by changing my perspective. I have been looking at every person, including myself, and finding something I like in everything. When I am silly, I can find something I like when I act silly. When I am serious, I can find something I like when I act serious. I have been putting together on this blog, a bunch of pictures and gif’s that show my view of beauty in every inch of the world. My challenge to you is to do the same. Create a collage, a blog post, notice it in your mind. Find your personality on someone else and document it as a beautiful you. For example, self as context says that we are only ourselves and that means without labels. It shows a way in which labels are inaccurate. Labels do not exist because we are not any certain thing 100% of the time. For me, I hated how big my feet were, until I saw it on someone else. This was actually Taylor Swift. We have around the same size and long, long ago, she was on Saturday night live, and I saw something that made me accept my feet, just because I liked the way they looked on her. Society tells us that we cannot be confident. Pretend like you’re in an action movie and love your damn self! I’ve talked about this before but when I was in 8th grade my teacher said her feet got bigger when she was pregnant. She clarified that they got longer. It was the way she talked about larger feet with different words. Longer, not bigger. Not that big is bad, but at the time, thinking my feet were just long really helped me accept. Love yourself. It is possible. Beauty is the eye of the beholder, and you are the beholder when you look in the mirror. You are not unloveable, you just don’t love yourself, while so many others see the light in you.

Today I did something embarrassing. Today was actually pretty rough. I was around someone who is rude to me and someone who I have gotten in a fight with due to both of our actions. She was rude and saying inappropriate things, and I handled the situation very ineffectively. Basically I am trying to stick up for myself and I have actually been doing well. However, today was a little different. There were many subtle things said to me and I did well at not hiding my emotions, until she said something that really was not fair. I couldn’t think of what to say to stand up for myself and I didn’t want to acknowledge my feelings anymore so I said nothing. Instead I ignored what she said then adjusted myself in my seat and made a very horrible, embarrassing grunt while I did it. I looked over at her and she was smiling to someone, which is my reminder that I should have been as embarrassed as I was about this. However, normally I would talk about my embarrassing situations just because I want to tell people who were not even there all my excuses for this weird thing I did. When I was in high school I had a bad cold and coughed really grossly and made excuses like I did it on purpose as a joke to see everyone’s reaction or something like that. Today, I am just saying that I did what I did, and that’s that. I didn’t do it on purpose. Yes, that horrible noise came from my own mouth. And yes, I am very strong for writing this post. As I was driving home I was thinking about how I have been able to counter my embarrassment lately, and this helped in writing this post. A few months ago I was driving and I had to drive really fast in order to let a semi truck onto the highway. For some reason if I do anything to draw attention to myself on the road, even just driving fast to let a truck on, I get really embarrassed. So, look at anything that has the power to embarrass you, and look at it as ferocity. If something can embarrass you, think of it as an opportunity to handle it with grace and by handling it well, you are fierce and strong. When I drove fast ahead of that truck that day, I didn’t think of myself as drawing attention to myself because obviously I’m doing something wrong or else I wouldn’t be needing to get out of the way, but I thought about how I was able to handle the situation physically and emotionally without getting embarrassed. And now, I’m going to be strong and talk about other embarrassing moments that I have made excuses for. Yes, I do not like admitting that I have ever grunted in my life before, and I hated using that word in this post. I didn’t even write grunt in my first draft. I had to think about it a few times before I decided to be strong and use that accurate word just because of how much I hate if I accidentally grunt and I have no idea why. The word grunt seems too painfully accurate of what completely happened this morning. In the past, I would have said I did it on purpose to see everyones reaction. When I was in high school my face got really red and my voice was shaking because I was doing a presentation. It was such a short presentation and when I mentioned that I was nervous, someone looked at me like I was weird. So I said, “I just didn’t do it right. I thought I was going to fail.” I am ashamed still of how shy I can be, but this is all true…I got extremely scared for a less than five minute presentation. A big one for me was that I used to study and think I understood everything, then I would understand the test and feel great about it, and then I would end up getting a D. So I would tell people who saw my paper that I didn’t even read the book. My young self is probably so excited that one day I can be strong enough to write this for anyone to see. 🙂 So next time you trip and fall, stand up and be proud that you emotionally survived that fall, and walk on feeling fierce and like you’re in an action movie because you are so emotionally strong.

They are all wonderful in their own ways. I just use this as an example of how comparing is unfair and all of their personalities can be desired by everyone if you allow yourself to look beyond your lack of desire. You can want to be Phoebe because of her strange sense of humor. You can love her strength and her quirkiness. Or Ross’ type of sense of humor. If this is your type of humor in the moment, you can love yourself for your sweet, kid like manner. Or you can love the moments when you complain in a cute quirky way like Rachel. Or Monica with her sense of humor with a lot of energy. And then there is Chandler where you seriousness and hilarity meet together into a well balanced medium. Look at yourself the way I looked at everyone here. There is something to love in everything, even if they are polar opposites.

Tonight I have strong urges. However, unlike the popular action of using skills to rid yourself of these urges, I am channeling them and using an urge to use behaviors as motivation to not use behaviors. I want to be strong and I want to fight. Tonight I am going into snack with an excitedness to fight. I’m going to feel out of control and guilty and that’s why I’m doing it. On days when I don’t have urges, I’m just eating. Today I am fighting and this is motivating to go to the battle.

I’m pretty sure all of us have been told this to some degree. As my last post showed, being silly can be beautiful, but so can being more serious. However, we are all both of these at some points in our lives. Labels do not exist for our entire soul. We are certain things at different times. So if you’ve been told to lighten up, look at these and pick which one your heart thinks is beautiful. Next time maybe you won’t be offended, because being more serious is beautiful too.

These people are not being silly. But that’s perfectly okay, just like all the aspects of you.